The MetaBrainz Summit 17 is slowly starting up, with everyone having arrived in Barcelona now, and people have already started discussing a bit in the corners of the MetaBrainz office. (As well as devouring a lot of chocolate!)

The summit officially starts tomorrow however (we’re aiming to begin at around 11 AM Barcelona time (CEST)), and while we’re having probably the most people at a summit ever, we recognise that a lot of people from the community are not able to be here for one reason or another, so we’re going to try something new tomorrow: live streaming the summit!

Our bandwidth provider will proceed to maintainance operations on its routers, on Sep, 28th between 5AM and 7AM CEST.
You may experience connectivity issues to our services during it, for a maximum of 20 minutes.

This release enables relationship credits for areas and places, contains more URL cleanup & auto-select fixes, and changes the behavior of the artist-merge option to rename credits to only rename those that match the original artist names.

I have recently released a new MusicBrainz virtual machine. This virtual machine includes all the important bits of MusicBrainz so you can run your own copy! I’d been hoping for feedback if people have encountered any problems with this VM, but I’ve not received any feedback. Here is to hoping that no news is good news!

Since we released the beta of ListenBrainz six weeks ago, people have moved over and imported their listen histories onto the beta site, which is great. While we think that everyone who needs to migrate listens off the old server has already done so, we’re going to give people another 30 days in case anyone hasn’t gotten around to it yet.

If you’ve never submitted original listens to the alpha server, this does not concern you! In fact, if this blog post is confusing to you, it probably means that you’re not affected by us turning off the alpha server on 18 October, 2017.

Here’s the second round of board meeting minutes. We have had board meetings both in November and in May, but the November board meeting only consisted of Robert, Sophie, Rassami, and Matthew meeting up in London approving the minutes of the prior meeting and agreeing to only hold 3 meetings in 2016. So we decided to kind of skip over reporting on that meeting and just include the summary when posting the minutes for the May meeting. Which I now just did. 😉

These minutes have been reviewed by the board but have not been formally approved at a board meeting yet, meaning that it is subject to change if the board feels something is wrong or missing. Also note that discussion related to personnel or confidential topics have been/will be redacted. Furthermore we may also add more text to the notes in order to give context and background, while not altering the meaning of these notes.